Thursday, December 4, 2014

Colleges Must Help Students Get a Life, Not Just a Job. From HuffPo, by Denison Uni's President.

Think in developmental terms. The initial years of college should be broad and inquisitive. Early on, students should be given opportunities to ask big questions about human history, the role of work, and the lives they want to lead. Small classes, faculty mentorship, and engaged learning environments are crucial. The linchpins are faculty mentorship and exposure to a wide range of courses.

Start early and explore often. By their second year in college, students should be involved in the career exploration process. It should start with a wide perspective and provide plentiful opportunities for students to interact with a range of people and hear stories about how they built careers and lives in different ways.

3 comments:

Students must take advantage of their opportunities, not just sit in class with one thumb up their ass and another in their mouth. To do that, students need to start doing six things:

Think in developmental terms. The initial years of college should be broad and inquisitive. Early on, students take advatnage of opportunities to ask big questions about how to get to campus in time for class, the role of spell check, and how to follow directions. Showing up every day, a working brain, and not texting in class are crucial. The linchpins are paying attention and putting in solid effort.

Start early and explore often. By their second year in college, students should have some idea of what they want to do. It should start with a conversation with a counselor who has enough of a backbone to tell the student that they'll probably never be a physicist if they can't pass basic algebra, and that a psychology degree is unlikely to get them a job.

Take advantage of the entire day. Most students only use their brains 60 percent of the day. They need to reimagine the college experience as 12 hours per day and use the times between classes for professionally oriented activities like working on homework, asking questions in office hours, and SHOWING UP TO THE MATH RESOURCE CENTER THAT OFFERS FREE TUTORING FOR SIXTY HOURS PER WEEK.

Ask parents and alumni to provide mentorship and expertise. LOL! Just kidding. Change needs to come from within. Or from a swift kick in the ass. Either way, parents and alumni usually aren't very helpful there.

Put away your cell phone NOW! Nothing trumps face-to-face classrooms that are small and interactive, except a cell phone. When students text, surf Facebook, or crush candy in class, they're basically saying, "Look at how little I care about my education!" At that point, all bets are off.

Support graduates as they drift mindlessly toward what they like to think are their on-ramps. Building a career is a process that begins with actually learning what your professors have to teach. Students need to spend the six years of their four-year degree actually digging into the course material and bloody asking a decent question once in a blue moon. This will tend to help students navigate the on-ramps into the professions, as nobody is going to want some twit who majored in drinking and groping, and most job interviews will include questions about things that high-school graduates might be expected to know.

What Was This?

College Misery was a dysfunctional group blog where professors got the chance to release some of the frustration that built up while tending to student snowflakes, helicopter parents, money mad Deans, envious colleagues, and churlish chairpeople.

Our parent site, Rate Your Students, started in 2005, and we continued that mission beginning in 2010. Ben at Academic Water Torture and Kimmie at The Apoplectic Mizery Maker both ran support blogs during periods when this blog had died.